*This question came from my observations of my google nest behavior*
Usually when I prompt the google nest to play Spotify, it has no flaws except once in a while. Sometimes it says there was an error, try again. Trying again a few times in a row yields the same outcome, even after unplugging and plugging back in, closing and reopening apps, and trying again. Though with no known changes of any relevant factors, a few hours later, works again when the last output of the device said “there was a error try again”
So, how can technology respond differently based on no altered variables except for time?
**not just because time makes things not work, but how can it work, later not work, and later again work with no changes of variables?
In: Technology
The parts you can see if you all Nest to play Spotify are a very small part of what is needed to fulfill your request. Your internet connection, dns name servers, switches and routers in a dozen datacenters, a huge set of different types of software that have a specific job, but sometimes fail. The list of things that participate to give you seamless access to music controlled by your voice is really too long to post.
So you can not see a change, but maybe some engineer at Spotify changed the settings on a load balancer (a device that sends your request to the server with the currently lowest workload) to fix a rare issue that only arises for a few select situations.
Technology is complicated. For it to play spotify it has to do 1000 things behind the scene. So while you think nothing changed, some thing very well could have changed.
You tell it to play spotify, it opens spotify app, connects to spotify server, requests song from spotify, downloads/streams it, sends it to the speakers, speakers start playing.
Likely what happened in your case was a connection error to the spotify servers.
A lot can go wrong. That you’re not even remotely aware of.
Ultra sonic sound nuisance making your voice not well perceived.
Internet connection failure.
Slight modulation in your voice that was translated into something completely different and meaningless.
There’s a LOT going on in the background.
To add to all the other answers, technology is constantly changed *by us*. In those 5-10 minutes between your device not working at all and working fine it’s quite likely that an engineer (software or otherwise) somewhere did their job by spotting the issue in a part of the system and fixing it.
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